


Small Mercies

by fiction_before_reality



Series: All AoS, All the Time [12]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, I don't know how to tag but seriously, I'm warning you, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Self-Sacrifice, Suicidal Thoughts, this is not a happy ending, this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29847102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiction_before_reality/pseuds/fiction_before_reality
Summary: AU of the end of Season 3 where Lincoln used too much power blasting Daisy back from the Quinjet when he sacrificed himself. Daisy realizes that this isn't something they can fix and strikes out on her own to right some wrongs before she dies.
Series: All AoS, All the Time [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2127987
Comments: 3
Kudos: 31





	Small Mercies

**Author's Note:**

> Hey so this just happened, this is the only time I've written a fic in which Daisy actually dies, so be warned. This is the most angsty thing I've ever written. I would love your feedback!! Also if you can think of any more tags I should add, please let me know! I tried really hard to tag all the possibly triggering things but I don't know if I did it well enough.

The transmission from the quinjet cuts off mid-sentence, just as Daisy is finally hearing that Lincoln loves her. He never gets to finish the sentiment, and she never gets to say it back. She watches, breaks down into sobs as the timer runs out and the quinjet explodes.

She attributes the pounding in her head to hitting the support beam when Lincoln blasted her out of the quinjet with a bolt of electricity. She attributes the pain in the rest of her body to her myriad injuries and the sense of dread, of longing, of gut-wrenching, bone-deep _sorrow_ that she hasn’t felt in a while.

She has to be picked up by the still-injured Mack and carried down to the med bay. Simmons determines through her tears and her own sorrow that Daisy has a mild concussion. Simmons orders her to at least two days of light activity, with checkups every day after that until Simmons is satisfied.

The whole time, Daisy feels like she’s listening on the other side of a wall. She can hear what Simmons is saying, but it sounds muffled, and the blood rushing through her feels louder. She nods when she thinks she’s supposed to. When Daisy comes back into her body again, she’s alone in the med bay. She numbly wanders to the command center. The team quiets as she enters the space.

“Tremors, you should be resting.” Mack comes over to set a hand on her shoulder. She flinches but grabs his hand when he moves to pull it back. She holds his hand for a moment like a lifeline.

She tries to speak, but the words stick in her throat. Daisy doesn’t know what she would even say. Her mouth opens and closes a couple of times before she releases Mack’s hand and goes to sit on one of the chairs in the common area adjacent to the command center.

Conversations start up again, but much softer and with a lot of quick glances at Daisy that she has the good grace not to mention.

It’s with her heart full of sorrow and her gut twisted with agony that Daisy realizes her truth. _Wherever she goes, death follows_. She allowed herself to forget the ominous comment that popped up when trying to discover her parentage. She allowed herself to pretend that once her parents were out of the picture, it wasn’t true anymore. But she knows now, as an absolute matter of fact, that nothing has changed. The people she loves will always die. She lists them off in a way that she hasn’t done before. A few of them, her brain snags on for a moment or two.

 _Eric Keonig_ \- Daisy counts Eric on her list. Ward killed him to try and trick and keep Daisy, back when she was still Skye. She feels her stomach still turn as she remembers the blood dripping down from the top of the shelving in the stockroom at Providence base.

 _Donnie Gill_ \- He was her first kill. At least her first on-purpose kill.

 _Trip_ \- He died trying to save her.

 _Jaiying_ \- Cal killed her for Daisy, to protect her.

 _Charles Hinton_ \- She tried so hard to save him. So hard. Instead, she got to tell his wife and child that he was never coming home.

 _Andrew_ \- Need she say more? He healed her, freed her from Hive’s persuasion, and got a hole burnt into him by Hellfire for his trouble.

 _Lincoln_ \- There are no words right now for what Lincoln did for her and to her. She will never be the same.

The realization of the fact that he’s not coming back mixes with the look in his eye when she would pin him to the mats while they were sparring, and Daisy is somehow both more broken and more whole than she has ever been. The room begins to spin, and she feels a strange pressure and pain in her chest before she knows nothing at all. The last thing she hears is the heavy thud of her body sliding off the chair, but she doesn’t feel the pain she knows she should as the room fades to black.

***

When Daisy woke, the pain in her chest was still there. She ignored it, focusing on the beeping of the heart monitor and the bright lights above that hurt her eyes. She heard light feet shuffling and asked softly on instinct, “Jemma?”

Daisy’s head lolled towards the side where the sound came from, and she saw Jemma turn her way. “Daisy, you’re up.” The corner of her mouth turned up in what was honestly a pretty poor attempt at a smile. “You gave us quite a scare there.”

“What happened?” Daisy sort of knew, but she had no idea why it had happened.

“You fainted. I’m running some bloodwork now, but the initial results were promising. I’m going to do an MRI of your head quickly, and then we need to get you cleaned up.”

Daisy didn’t know how long she had been wearing these goddamn clothes, but they were filthy and sweaty and grimy. She nodded her agreement and Jemma moved the portable MRI over Daisy’s head. The process nearly lulled Daisy back into sleep, but she was kept awake by thoughts of Lincoln and by the pain in her chest. She really didn’t want Dr. Pokey to come out to play, so she kept her mouth shut about the pains.

As Jemma moved the MRI back to its home in the med bay, May’s soft voice came over the intercom. “We’re landing in five. Strap in.”

The mood at the Playground was subdued. Normally after a mission, the halls would be bustling with agents fixing damage the planes took, checking out injured agents, and congratulating the teams who had made the mission possible and successful.

But today, the agents walked slower and with their heads down more. Daisy caught more than a few pitying glances in her periphery, and she knew that her beat up face, still puffy from crying, didn’t help matters. But she stared straight ahead with her head held high and her shoulders back, trying for all the world to act like May would’ve. She was glad she had insisted on walking rather than being wheeled in on a gurney or in a chair. Her chest ached with every step, and breathing was more painful than she wanted to admit. But after what she had just seen, it felt like all of her emotions and physical needs were dampened. She was just … numb.

When Daisy got back to her room, she immediately took everything that reminded her of Lincoln and shoved it into an empty duffel bag from her closet. There wasn’t much, just a picture, a shirt he had bought her, and a tiny glass flower that was supposed to be indestructible. She was sure it was to anyone without the power to shake everything to dust. As she looked at the three distinctively _Lincoln_ things, Daisy was struck by how little time they had had together.

The duffel bag went under her desk, and Daisy stripped off her clothes and threw them in the trash. It was like a ritual for her. On a mission where one of their people died, she got rid of all of the non-tactical gear. She went through too many clothes, but she had realized early on that she never looked at a shirt the same way when it had been on a mission that included the death of an agent. There was a reason why she shopped secondhand stores, and it wasn’t just because she was poor anymore. She didn’t like to think about how many times she had thrown away an outfit in just the past six months.

This time, Daisy changed her trash bag immediately. The sight of her clothes in it had her wanting to throw up, so she took the clothes down to the furnace in the basement, wrapped in only a robe that she had hastily put on. Her clothes were all natural fibers, so she didn’t feel bad as she watched the tendrils of smoke that drifted up before the pants and shirt burst into flames.

As Daisy started back up to her room, she felt a sharp, searing pain in her chest that made her lean into the wall to avoid falling. She slid down the wall slowly, trying to keep breathing as deeply as she could. When she sat down on the cool concrete floor, she pulled her robe open slowly, checking if there was external damage she could pinpoint.

Daisy sighed heavily at the mess that was her chest. Her skin was charred in about a three-inch circle, with black tendrils reaching all across her upper body. She didn’t know why it didn’t hurt more. Once the sharp pains had subsided enough to stand, Daisy dragged herself up off the floor and went back to her room. She grabbed her towel and shower caddy before making her way to the bathroom.

Each of the showers was in its own individual room off the main hallway, which Daisy had never been more grateful for. She stripped off her robe, hung it and her towel up, and stepped into the hot shower spray. What should’ve been her perfect temperature was scalding her to the bone for some reason, so she hopped back from the spray and turned the temperature down. It took her running the shower on the coldest setting before she stopped feeling like she was being roasted alive.

As she tried to wash the marks on her chest away, Daisy grew more concerned. Some of the charring had washed away, but the angular, sharp lines spreading out from the charred area were still as prominent. It looked just as it normally did on a surface where Lincoln had used his powers, and Daisy took a moment to be awed by his abilities. To be able to fry someone like this without even trying … Daisy stopped. That was a really weird line of thinking.

She knew she should tell Simmons, but something stopped Daisy. The creeping feeling in her stomach, the one that was never wrong, told her that nothing Simmons could do would help.

***

Once the base was quiet for the night, Daisy slipped out of bed. She grabbed her packed duffel bag and went out the door and down the halls to Simmons’ lab. She knew how to use the new body scanner that Simmons had worked on with Fitz, and the readings confirmed her suspicions. She printed off a copy of the results and wiped the memory on the device before she put it back in its drawer.

The paper read:

_Inhuman biology detected_

_Diagnosis: massive soft-tissue damage_

_Location: chest cavity: cardiac muscle and pulmonary tissue_

_Likelihood of one-year survival with best treatment: 3%._

Daisy gulped as she looked at her odds. As she left the lab, she snagged a batch of the bone-healing medications. She left enough that they wouldn’t be in trouble if someone else needed them, but Daisy was going to need them if she did what she was planning.

She grabbed the stack of letters that she had prepared and left them on the table in the main common area. Someone would find them in the morning.

Daisy had also prepared the rest of her room. There was a neat box filled with mementos of her and the team that were labelled for each person. There was another box of things with instructions to donate the contents. It was mostly just extraneous clothing that she couldn’t pack if she wanted to travel light.

The duffel bag Daisy had packed contained her stuff from Lincoln, a couple of ICERS with a bunch of extra clips, a few changes of clothes, her makeup bag, and not much else. She had never been one to wear a lot of makeup, so it made sense to start doing it as she was evading SHIELD.

She had also grabbed her go-stash, which was housed in a casual purse: a couple grand in cash, a few untraceable credit cards, a nearly unhackable laptop, and a couple of fake IDs. Daisy had wanted so badly to never need to use this stash. She thought that she had finally found her place, her home, her family. And she had, but she couldn’t grieve Lincoln and be here and have them all worry about her. She needed to go fix some of her wrongs.

Daisy chose to take one of the secret emergency exits up to the surface, not that there was much in the way of security around to stop her right now. She and the Primatives had done a hell of a number on the base. Daisy paused in the server room briefly, plugging a flash drive into the main panel. She waited the fifteen seconds that her program would take to erase the footage of her in the lab and to swap it out for some footage from earlier in the day. It would also hide the fact that she had ever been in the server room. The last thing she needed was the team getting suspicious about why she had been in there and managing to uncover her little self-checkup.

It was with a heavy heart and pained breaths that Daisy left the Playground. She needed to make amends before she died. Lincoln had died for her to live, but he had also managed to kill her.

She couldn’t be mad. She tried to feel something, but all she could muster up was some of that same deep sorrow. Lincoln couldn’t have known that the bolt of electricity was going to hurt her. He was injured, near death, and he didn’t have control of his power.

Daisy was so glad he wasn’t here to see this.

***

Daisy didn’t know how much time she had left. She dulled her pain with increasing amounts of painkillers. It never really went away but she was able to function enough to keep kicking the shit out of the Watchdogs. She was responsible for them. If she hadn’t quaked the Terrigen crystals into the ocean, none of this would’ve happened.

And speaking of quaking … goddamn did she hate that name. _Quake_. Mack calling her Tremors had been one thing. That had been a name born of affection, of friendship and family. _Quake_ was all fear. She was the big bad evil Inhuman who was robbing banks and terrorizing American citizens.

She was an American citizen too, but go off. Also, she wasn’t robbing anyone who didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t like the money was for her. She siphoned off money for a variety of causes. Robin and Polly Hinton got enough to keep them comfortable for a long time. Amanda, Lincoln’s sister, got a sizeable chunk of money to cover his memorial service and to help Daisy try to atone for his death. She did extensive research into each organization that she donated money to.

As time went on, Daisy started to actually prepare for her death. She didn’t care about what happened to her body. That didn’t matter. But she knew that Coulson needed closure, that the team needed closure. She wrote more letters, wrote a diary for them. She had protocols in place. She had to reset a timer every week. If she didn’t reset it, someone would unseal an envelope ordering them to pack up the items of safety deposit box 753 in Hillton, Indiana and ship them to one Mr. Jonathan Koskela (an alias of Coulson’s). Every week, Daisy added new letters to the box. Some weeks, she apologized. Once, she explained. Gave the whole story, including the pain in her chest and the drugs she had stolen from SHIELD as she left.

Every week, the pile of papers in the lock box got bigger, and Daisy grew weaker.

***

Lincoln haunted her nightmares and her dreams. There wasn’t really a difference now.

Her nightmares were watching him and Hive blow up again through the window of the Zephyr. He screamed and railed against her. Some nights, she was there with him, watching him bleed to death before they both exploded with the bomb.

In her dreams, Lincoln whispered to her, begging her to come see him. He assured her that it was ok, that death wasn’t really that bad. And eventually, she would reach out to touch him. He was always just out of reach.

***

When Daisy found the Ghost Rider, she was ready to be done. She was weaker than she had ever felt before. Her breathing was never unlabored now. She was taking a frightening number of painkillers just to operate, and the sharp pains had disappeared, replaced by a deep throbbing that never left her. She barely noticed the pain in her arms from not wearing her gauntlets, though she had used the last of the bone-healing medication weeks ago.

As Daisy threw a quake out with both hands to stop the shelf falling on her during her fight with the Ghost Rider, she saw him come up beside her, tilting his head quizzically. She groaned as she felt the bones in her arms start grating against one another. “Do it.”

She panted. “I deserve it.” _Please, end it now. I shouldn’t be alive when he’s already dead, and this is just cruel._ “Do it!”

She wanted to scream when he got up and just walked away from her. She contemplated just letting the shelf drop onto her, but her self-preservation instincts were a bit too strong for that, even if they were barking up the wrong tree by existing at this point. She was a dead woman walking.

***

When Mack wrapped her arm in a splint and bandages, his soft look was bad enough. All he wanted was for her to come home, even once he realized that Yo-Yo had been stealing the bone-healing medications for her. But Fitz’s anger was what killed Daisy.

“She's turned her back on us, Mack! Because something terrible happened, and she didn't want our help getting through it.”

Mack tried to interrupt, “Slow down, Turbo.”

Fitz didn’t listen, didn’t slow down, and each of his words was a dagger in Daisy’s heart. “Well, we've all been through terrible things—all of us—and we've never turned our back!”

Daisy paused for a moment, looking back and forth between Fitz and Mack. She wanted so badly to spill her guts here and now, but what would that do? Nothing could change that she was going to die, and she didn’t want to burden them with that. Instead, she just said, “I-I'm... doing what I need to do.”

Mack’s voice was low and his eyes were shiny with unshed tears. “And it still affects us. Like it or not.”

God, how she wished that wasn’t the case.

“Thank you … for the splint.” She left so many things unsaid. _Thank you for being my partner, my best friends, my family. Thank you for caring, but there’s nothing you can do._

***

There was a time in her life where Daisy would’ve given anything to live. How many times on missions had she prayed desperately to any god that existed for her to make it out safe? She had begged and pleaded to live another day, to not let her team—her family—down.

But now she went into every fight with a resignation she had never known. Her bones grated against one another with every movement, and every non-medicated moment of her day was pure agony. She locked herself into the cafeteria of the prison knowing that she probably would be killed. But she would get to do what Lincoln did. She would get to die so that her team could live.

Every time that Jemma tried to get Daisy into the infirmary, it was a fight. Daisy got her hands on some more of the bone-healing meds and called it a day, promising that she could take care of herself. She knew that if any of the team found out about her condition, they would try to find a way around it. That 3% chance would be enough for them to try and move heaven and earth.

No matter what the slim chance was, Daisy knew she wasn’t going to beat the odds this time. She lived every day like it was her last. She fought on behalf of her friends. When the base was overrun with LMDs, she bought Jemma and a couple of others the time they needed to get out of there. She made it onto the plane too, somehow.

She made it through the fucked-up world of the Framework. For a brief moment as she looked down at the backdoor that she had opened, Daisy considered staying in the virtual reality. She was going to die soon anyways. Why shouldn’t her last few breaths be in this world where she could actually breathe without pain? Against the voice that told her to stay, Daisy made the jump.

***

When she realized that the Rider was the only way to kill the new Inhuman-AIDA for good and that AIDA would never allow Robbie to get close enough, the choice was simple.

“I’ll do it.” Her voice rang out stronger than it had in a while, through the command center of the Zephyr where they were all debating how to get the Rider into someone else. Daisy saw all the surprised looks from her former teammates.

This was what she had wanted. She knew that the Rider was going to need something in return for helping her, for helping them. She knew that she would forfeit her life and possibly her soul. It was what she had wanted. A way out without guilt. A way to make the same sacrifice that Lincoln had. To go out fighting, just like she always had.

So why did it feel so terrible now?

***

The part of Daisy that was still her and not the Rider felt the satisfaction of burning AIDA deep in her soul. The Rider felt nothing except vengeance, at least not that Daisy could feel.

The Rider let go of her body, and Daisy returned to the forefront. Fitz and Simmons were standing there with her, looking at the charcoal remains of AIDA’s attempt at an Inhuman body.

Simmons asked, “Is she really-”

“Yeah.” Daisy felt AIDA’s death in the same way that she was feeling her own now. She didn’t have long, but it would have to be enough time.

She hurried to get the Darkhold to Robbie. She had to touch him in order to give back the Rider, and she surprised even herself by pulling him into a hug, shuddering as the Rider faded from her mind, taking most of the very little strength she still had left. It took everything in her not to collapse then and there.

Robbie’s eyes had a million emotions Daisy couldn’t decipher in them as he pulled back. “I don’t envy you.” His voice was low and measured.

She tried to crack a joke. “Funny, I was going to say the same thing to you.” It fell very flat.

“Goodbye, Daisy.”

“Bye, Robbie.”

With a long look at her and barely a glance back at the rest of the team, Robbie stepped into the portal that Daisy had created for him with the Rider’s help.

Coulson’s voice was sharp. “What did he mean by that?”

Daisy shrugged. “Anyone want some pie?”

***

Despite the robot fight that went down at the base, things were actually going alright. Mack had run out for some pie, and Daisy was set up in the common room with her laptop.

She pulled up the surveillance feed from the intelligence inquiry where Talbot had been shot, eventually finding the footage of her LMD shooting him in the head. She also found footage of the real her about half a mile away from a surveillance camera outside a gas station. Technically, you couldn’t tell which one was which, but it was at least enough to provide doubt that Agent Daisy Johnson of SHIELD was responsible for Talbot’s injuries.

Next, Daisy hacked into the hospital system where Talbot had been taken. She wrote a program that would ping Coulson’s email with every update about Talbot’s condition, including whether he was transferred somewhere else. Daisy didn’t feel right about this whole thing, and she worried that someone would try to take advantage of someone that close to her team.

Once Daisy had done all of the things that she could out and around the team, she took her laptop to what had been her room. She sat down on the familiar bed and crossed her legs, setting her laptop in front of her.

She started a recording.

“Hey guys. We’ve just defeated AIDA, and I’m dying. If you’re seeing this, it means I already am. In a minute, I’m going to record a few different videos giving a few different stories about my time as a vigilante. Pick whichever one works best for your narrative and destroy the rest.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and swallowed hard. “I’m not going to make my full explanation here and now. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve got protocols set up that mean in a few days, Coulson is going to receive a box. That’ll tell you more. Basically, I’ve known since the day Lincoln died that I was dying. When he blasted me with electricity to get me out of the quinjet, he used too much and it fried me.”

Daisy pulled her stretchy shirt down so that the camera could see the scorch marks that had never gone away.

“I wanted you to know that I wasn’t trying to die just because I wanted to. This was inevitable. My deal with the Ghost Rider was that he got to take my enhanced healing in exchange for helping me. It was the only reason I lived this long. But I was always going to die. I’ve been feeling it for a while now.

“I’m glad I got to help save you all. I wish I had more time with you. I wish I could explain every little thing in just the right way, but I feel like I need to sleep soon and I want to make these videos first.

“This is the most important thing that I am going to tell you guys: what happened to me was not your fault. My chances of surviving a year were less than five percent. I guess I didn’t beat the odds this time. And Fitz, Mack, May—everyone who I fought with over the past few days when I was keeping you at arm’s length—please don’t beat yourselves up. You know I’m one stubborn bastard. I wanted to make this easier for you, and I’m really sorry if I made it harder.” Daisy felt the tears well up and her throat constrict for the first time in the whole video.

“Another super important thing: I need you guys to just cremate me and be done with it. Bury my ashes or scatter them or whatever if you want, but I don’t want my body poked or prodded at by _anyone_ , understood? No resurrection attempts, no blood samples, _nothing_. All of my previous medical files are null and void. This video is the closest thing I have to a last will and testament, so please respect it and don’t fuck around with it.”

Daisy reached out towards the camera like she could touch her team again, but of course all that was there was the screen of the laptop, cool to the touch. “Goodbye, guys. I love you all, and I’m so glad I had you in my life.”

She ended the video and paused for a few minutes before starting the next one, which was one of her testimonies about being a vigilante.

It took hours for Daisy to record all of the videos she wanted to and in just the right way. She took her passcodes off the computer so that it would play for any member of her team. When she was finished, she put her closed laptop on the desk in the room with a note that read “play me in order.”

She went to sleep knowing that she wouldn’t wake up again. As she drifted off to sleep with the glass flower from Lincoln clutched tightly in her grasp, Daisy hoped that Simmons wouldn’t react too badly when she couldn’t save her.

***

 _Small mercies_ , said the whispers around the base. People who had never met Daisy were talking about her small mercies.

What small mercies?

It hadn’t been a small mercy for Fitz to be the one to find Daisy lying on her bed, her hands cold as ice and her lips blue. It hadn’t been a small mercy for him to scream for Simmons, for her to try to save Daisy even though she must’ve been dead for hours. It wasn’t a small mercy that Daisy had apparently prepared for her death, if the first video on her laptop was anything to go by.

And still, the agents spoke of small mercies.

 _Small mercy_ that she wasn’t suffering anymore.

 _Small mercy_ that she had made it this long.

 _Small mercy_ that she had slipped away in her sleep.

 _Small mercy_ that she had saved her team time and time again before she died.

 _Small mercy_ that they had a body to cremate, that they got ashes to bury.

It _was_ a small mercy that May hadn’t beaten one of the idiots who kept talking about _Quake_ like they had any right to into the ground. It wasn’t Quake who had sacrificed herself for her team, for her family. It was Daisy.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this or just want to yell at me, please leave a comment!  
> And as always, prompts can be submitted to me in a comment below or on Tumblr ([@fictional-before-real](http://fictional-before-real.tumblr.com/) ).


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